Gestural coordination of the velum in singing can be different from coordination in speech

Abstract

Professional singers are trained to maximize vowel duration and minimize consonant interference, while still maintaining intelligibility. The mechanisms by which they do this, however, are unclear. A deeper understanding of the gestural mechanisms utilized during professional-quality singing could be useful to train singers more effectively. It has been well-established that nasal sounds in syllable coda position have longer and larger velum motion in formal speech as compared to casual speech. The hypothesis of this study was that coda velum gestures would be temporally extended proportional to the duration of the entire syllable. To test this, real-time magnetic resonance (rtMR) images of trained soprano singers were used to track the motion of the velum. The boundaries of the vocal tract were mapped to a semi-polar grid, and the velocity of the velum at every frame of its movement was calculated. An important result shows that operatic singing has minimal change in velum gesture duration compared to speech, while a musical theater style can have velum lowering for the duration of a word. Observed gestural kinematics and their implications for speech are discussed from within the framework and perspective of Articulatory Phonology.